For the past several years, post-acute care providers have beat the drum, “send us help”, “send us supplies”, “send us staff”, but to no avail. The general public was and continues to be told we didn’t do our job in protecting our residents. Not only is this information hurtful, it is also false, each and every one of us did …
Since the beginning of time, it seems, we have educated our staff on the importance of root cause analysis (RCA). RCA is mainly used to identify “why” something happened, including falls, sepsis, elopements, etc. Our QAPI committees meet quarterly (or more often, hopefully) and discuss the “5 whys”, we “peel back the onion”, we use the fishbone diagram, but no …
Many of our centers provide care to residents with a diagnosis of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) however many of us treat behaviors/symptoms but know little about the diagnosis. Have you ever considered the effects of concussion, also considered a TBI, on long-term outcomes? Think about it, have you ever experienced a fall, hit your head, watched your child or grandchild …
For those of you who know me, I have been a longstanding proponent of fewer medications in our senior population, however, polypharmacy continues to plague our centers and seniors living in the community. Sure, there are medications that MUST be continued, such as insulin, cardiac medications, etc. however, I remember working the floor in a center (yes, years ago) and …
Whenever I hear the term PTSD, I think about the many men and women who served their country and are living with this debilitating diagnosis. Thanking them for their service is easy, living with PTSD is not. What we rarely think about are other people, maybe someone you know, who may be living with PTSD without ever having served their …
I know what you are thinking, but I’m not going to harp on you to run a marathon, I’m truly not, HOWEVER…..did you know that approximately 110,000 deaths per year in the United States could be prevented if adults aged 40 to 85 years or older increased their moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) by about 10 minutes per day? …
Okay already, we have all been bombarded with research on how loneliness impacts overall health. We have all lived through “lockdowns” in our centers where we watched our residents on a slippery slope of decline, obviously related to being separated from their families. Isn’t what we have learned and lived been enough? Nope, another research study published in Neurology is …
If you were contacted by OSHA during the COVID-19 pandemic, be prepared for an onsite visit in the next 3 months. Today the Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced an enforcement memorandum for a short-term increase in highly focused inspections directed at hospitals and skilled nursing care facilities that treat or handle COVID-19 patients. Their goal is to expand …
You know what I’m talking about, right? You know, that dull, achy feeling you have in your lower back when you try to do more than you should! Or, how about the chronic back pain you blame on your mattress? Whatever the cause, chronic low back pain (CLBP) is a pain and a recent study concluded that many of the …
For those of us fortunate enough to have never sustained a traumatic injury resulting in the loss of a limb or living with a birth defect affecting our limbs, we probably give little thought to science researching limb regrowth. But for the millions of people affected, they long for researchers to find a way to replace their prosthetic device and …
